Music, Digitalization, and Democratic Elections: The Changing Soundtrack of Electoral Politics in the UK

ABSTRACT

This article considers the position of music in UK General Elections. It begins by looking at mainstream Party Election Broadcasts, and then discusses the fragmentation of this electoral and musical landscape through the technological and communicative affordances of digital media. Considering campaigners as “produsers”, it examines how musical campaign content illustrates the shifting outputs of those operating within, and outside of, party political structures. These changes relate to broader questions of the extent, or limits, of digitalization’s potential for democratizing political communication. Considering the musical aesthetics of election campaigns is a step toward examining the decision-making processes that underpins them.

Keywords:

• Campaign music
• general elections
• party election broadcasts
• produsage

Political campaigns have long been about more than words alone. Music, too, is integral to political parties’ attempts to “brand themselves and to forge constituencies of support” and, underlying this, through the “thought that music makes it possible to experience” political values (Street Music 171–72).

This article seeks to demonstrate some of the effects of digitalization in music production and consumption on election campaigning. Digital tools and platforms, I argue, have had an impact beyond the proliferation of content and lowering of the barriers to entry for producing recorded media (and musical) content. They have also affected how music is used in key democratic processes, namely – elections. Examining the role of music in election campaigns helps to shed light on the broader implications for the production, dissemination, and consumption of music, and their relevance to the relationships between popular culture and political culture. Using examples from election campaigns in the United Kingdom, I show how the confluence of social media platforms, and their increasing prominence in campaign activities, has afforded new possibilities for intervention in the political process. This has led to a dilution of top-down content in the musical components of campaigns and contributed to a broader process of decentralization.

The article builds on theoretical understandings of longer-term shifts in the media landscape that have facilitated a burgeoning cohort of those operating in the converged media spaces where digital technology blurs the boundaries between production and consumption – “prosumers” to use a term coined by Alvin Toffler, or, following Axel Bruns’s observation of increasing collaboration, active agency, and iterative development of content, “produsers” (“Towards Produsage”; Blogs). I use Bruns’s formulation here, given the deliberate and focused contributions to the political process of the participants described below. In more specifically musical terms, this class of content creator has been referred to by Nick Prior as the “new amateurs,” a usage I also adopt here as it speaks to their use of low-cost, consumer technology, quick turnarounds, and, in the case of elections, propensity to operate outside of traditional industry structures and markets.

Through the examination of specific instances of music in UK campaign materials, I demonstrate the changes over the last three decades and the ways in which centralized content has given way to more widely distributed, and more diffusely produced, campaign content. A discussion follows of the ways in which the musical landscape of recent UK elections has become fragmented and how this plays out in the musical content of campaign materials. These changes, I argue, show how the new possibilities provided by digitalization, alongside the increasing use of social media, have opened new fronts in the use of music for election campaigns. The musical palette of campaigns has been broadened through the affordances of digital technology, their use by politically minded members of the public, and the corresponding responses of political parties which have become infused with the aesthetic of user-generated content. The shift from a top-down model focused on broadcast materials to the more open playing-field of the digital environment, I suggest, points toward productive areas for further investigation. The new dynamic evidenced by changes in musical content raises questions about how, and why, musical choices are made by political practitioners to assess the extent to which digitalization and its affordances constitute genuine democratization, or an incorporation of new techniques into existing power structures.

Background: Party Election Broadcasts and the Longer-Term Context of Musical Campaign Messages

A longstanding feature of UK election campaigns has been Party Election Broadcasts (PEBs), short films broadcast on free-to-air television stations in slots allocated to the parties for free by the broadcasters, to a schedule agreed by regulators. While it is difficult to conclusively prove the extent to which music (or other campaign content, such as posters, broadcasts, or leaflets) has a direct causal effect on voter behavior, PEBs, and campaign events featuring music, exist within a nexus of audience (and voter) perceptions and activities. The significance of music’s use in campaigning here, then, is not solely through the means by which it succeeds (or fails) at directly influencing voters so much as its position amongst a broader host of media outputs and effects.

Here, too, there is a wider debate about the extent of mass media’s influence on electoral outcomes. Caution about the role of media forms the bedrock of a range of analyses that views it as, at best, degrading public discourse. Neil Postman, for instance, lamented the capacity of watching television for “amusing ourselves to death.” Others, by contrast, have drawn attention to the many factors with which media outputs, including campaign materials, comingle. Kenneth Newton outlines some of the contexts that pertain to the ascription of “minimal effects” including the social networks of television and newspaper consumers, the resistance of their core political values – intersecting with factors like class, age, ethnicity, and gender (216) – and a marketplace in which readers and viewers have varying, often low, levels of trust in major media organs (217). The situation, however, is complex. It is difficult to ascribe a causal relationship between media outputs and election results (see Newton 221–22 for examples). This need not, however, preclude the role of media in fostering “attitudinal uncertainty,” as Neil Gavin puts it, especially over time (828). Further, the acknowledged potential, even amongst adherents of “minimal impact”, for media to “reinforce” public perceptions still has wide parameters with “results [that] can … be consequential, and in fact, profoundly so” (Gavin 840). The point here, regarding music, is not therefore that it is directly, causally, impactful in either PEBs or in the growing number of media spaces on which it can be found in electoral campaigns. Rather, like other media outputs, in general, in the face of digitalization, it intersects in a complex nexus with audience perceptions and activities. In the social media age, these include campaigning activities independent of the political parties and the potential for both strong and weak intersections with specific political messages. Proponents of both strong and weak media effects note that they exist within a framework of other factors. The shifting position of music within these broader frames – from PEBs, through musicians’ interventions to grassroots web productions – is therefore a necessary component of the “nuanced analysis” that Gavin calls for (839). As a step toward this, the examples below demonstrate how changes in the context of PEBs, notably their accompaniment by interventions and campaign content on social media, have changed their relationship with audiences, and consequently altered the dynamic within the nexus of voter/audience perceptions.

In the UK, political advertising on television and radio is not allowed, so an agreed schedule of Party Political Broadcasts takes their place. PEBs are similarly regulated broadcasts, produced during election campaigns. In recent years, these have been partly supplanted, or at least supplemented, by online materials, produced both by political parties and by their supporters (or detractors). For much of the late twentieth century, the PEB was a core aspect of campaigns. PEBs in the UK have however changed significantly since their introduction to television in 1951. Labour’s broadcasts of 1959 marked an initial turn away from static footage of party grandees addressing the camera about policy issues and Harold Wilson continued this pattern upon becoming a media friendly leader of the Labour Party, building links with advertising and PR professionals from the 1960s (Wring 98).

This professionalization was given a significant boost in 1979 when the Conservative Party used advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi to produce its print and broadcast messages, helping to shift PEBs toward becoming, as Saatchi’s Managing Director put it, “long commercials rather than short films” (Haigron 2). The Labour Party, likewise, appointed a Director of Communications in 1985 with a background in television and an eye for slicker productions. Thus, the trend was toward shorter, faster-paced PEBs featuring more, and shorter, shots (Gunter, Saltziz, and Campbell 236–37). Such professionalization was part of a wider trend in campaign management, attributed to American influence and detectable throughout Western Europe in the 1970s and 1980s in, for instance, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (Gasser and Gerlach 153). Certainly, in the UK, although televisual campaign content was still reserved for tightly regulated slots, these broadcasts came “increasingly to resemble advertisements,” including their use of music (249).

The use of popular music as a component of PEBs arguably reached its apogee in 1997, when the Labour Party’s use of D:Ream’s hit “Things Can Only Get Better” (Labour Party “Things”) was central to a campaign that saw a wholesale adoption of popular culture in its branding exercise (Street “Do Celebrity Politics” 348) alongside the foregrounding of its leader Tony Blair. Much had been made of Blair’s relative youth and familiarity with pop culture since he took up the party leadership – he had played in a band at university, for instance, and posed for the press with a Fender Stratocaster. Rock stars like Damon Albarn of the band Blur had visited him at party offices in parliament (Harris xiii). In short, the implication was that Blair – and by extension, his party – had pop culture credentials that their Conservative opponents lacked. This was reinforced by the media materials, especially the PEBs.

A high-water mark of both electoral success for Labour and popular music’s integration into centrally produced campaign messaging, the late 1990s also marked the beginning of the end of broadcast’s dominance. With the web already established, 1998 would see the birth of Google, followed by Facebook in 2004, YouTube in 2005 and Twitter in 2006. Labour’s use of the Lighthouse Family’s song “Lifted” in 2001 and U2’s “Beautiful Day” in 2005 were less impactful and amidst a host of factors – including the pressures of long-term incumbency – accompanied by gradually diminishing electoral returns, while by 2010 the role of social media was also becoming increasingly apparent. The Conservative Party’s use of the band Keane’s “Everybody’s Changing” to soundtrack its manifesto launch provoked an immediate public backlash from the group, with drummer Richard Hughes airing his displeasure on Twitter, declaring himself “horrified” at the use of the song, affirming that permission had not been sought, and that he would not be voting Conservative (Pidd). Artists’ scope for preventing the use of their music at rallies is limited under copyright provision and Keene were powerless to prevent the Tories’ use of their song in an event covered by the relevant performing rights license. The band member’s response – and its uptake as a news story by the wider media (Pidd) – nevertheless illustrated a shift in the musical terms of engagement for politicians, including the speed with which political uses of music could transfer across media, and therefore onto news agendas, and a widening of the channels across which political communication was taking place. What this incident demonstrated was the extent to which a media environment infused with social media diminished the capacity for parties’ uses of music to operate independently of audience, and musicians’, concerns. While the Conservative Party was covered legally in their use of Keane’s song – since the venue would have the requisite license to use copyrighted music – the fact remained that they had done so without permission and the band, via Twitter, had a large digital platform, and instantaneous capacity for reply. This is less a matter of the amount or even kinds of music being used in campaigns and more to do with the communicative potential of digital platforms opening up channels of communication and response between politicians, musicians and their fans.

As the twenty-first century approached its second decade, the increasingly digital environment in which campaigns took place meant that musical acts and politicians alike were operating on something of a flatter playing field as the rapid and widespread dissemination afforded by the web allowed activists and artists greater – if not complete – parity with party machines in their capacity to take their political statements to the eyes and ears of the voting public, both directly on the web, and indirectly through other media sources, such as newspaper reporting of their activities. In the next section I look more specifically at the ways in which digital modes of production and consumption allowed new possibilities for campaigners, and some of the effects of this on the campaigns, and where music fits into them.

Centrally Produced Messages

The UK electorate in 2010 was undecided, delivering an inconclusive result with no party holding an overall majority (an outcome known as a hung parliament) and while there are several broader reasons for this, related to the UK’s political geography and electoral system (Curtice 635), the emergence of an online media landscape has also been cited. Sanders posits “the rise of social media and social media conversations” as a potential factor and the tendency of social media to reinforce availability and confirmation biases amongst its users is another likely contributor (104). This media landscape is one where, whether strong or weak, the effect of music is bound up within wider messages that overlap with listeners’ and viewers’ preexisting political predilections and social milieux.

Political parties worldwide have paid increasing attention to social media and web platforms as both a means of communicating messages to voters and of gathering information about them in an electoral environment that is increasingly data driven (Anstead). Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, for example, posted over 1,800 videos to YouTube including speeches, advertisements and supporter statements (Crigler et al. 103). In Europe, likewise, Vesnic-Alujevic and Van Bauwel have noted that, despite widespread variation in content across countries and parties for European Parliament election campaigns, there is nevertheless “a specific sort of political audiovisual advertising different from television advertising by its specific elements but also due to the their possibilities for integration of different web 2.0 functions” (Vesnic-Alujevic and Van Bauwel 209). This has certainly been the case, also, in the UK. Viral content has been added to the PEB and poster advertisements as a media campaign tool. While the jury is still out on the extent to which social media feeds through directly into election results (Bright et al.) one concomitant of its increasing use has been that political messaging online produced by political parties (or creative agencies commissioned by them) has evolved to reflect its increasingly variegated media environment with parties deploying platform-friendly, easily shared content that fits into the fast paced, online “meme culture” (Dean). A key relationship here, aesthetically speaking, is between those messages produced or commissioned by party offices or employees and those made by supporters or activists working independently of the campaign (“produsers,” to follow Bruns). The musical components of party produced messaging have also evolved in tandem with this trend since the 2010s. The examples below show how the increasingly digital context of election campaigns has led to party messaging on digital platforms coming to resemble user-generated content while, at the same time, it has become comparatively decentered within PEBs.

Music has been used in service of making brief, highly specific points. Ed Miliband, for instance, was Labour leader in the 2015 General Election and a key component of Conservative electoral strategy was the message that, in the event of a hung parliament, he would be beholden to the Scottish National Party, who looked set to make big gains in Scotland. A Conservative social media clip from 2015 – imploring viewers to “SHARE this video with friends” (Conservative Party “Don’t Risk It”) features a non-descript piano refrain over a panoply of images supporting the message of “2 Million Jobs Created Since 2010.” The blandness of the music is deliberate, its effect being to serve as background before the reassuring aesthetic is harshly interrupted by the sound of breaking glass, and the appearance of a new message in stark, red letters – “Don’t Risk It With Miliband and the SNP.”¹ The whole video is thirteen seconds long, its quasi-comedic stance reliant on the native aesthetic of the web, and an implicit understanding that impact must be quick to avoid users clicking elsewhere within the flow of content and multiplicity of options. This is in contrast to the more sustained messages of PEBs, where the political point is developed over several minutes, the music acting more as a supportive soundtrack rather than as a swift, impactful sting.

A YouTube clip by Labour uses similarly generic music, this time for comedic effect and reminiscent of 1950s advertisements or game shows (upbeat brushed drums, pizzicato strings and tuned percussion to the fore). The clip – also well under a minute long – derides Conservative spending plans under the heading “Five times an IOU is unacceptable” (Labour Party “Five Times”) useing images of Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne captioned with everyday activities – buying chips, or a round of drinks in the pub – before the punch-line of “Funding the NHS.” The quotidian set-up is reinforced by the light entertainment soundtrack before the matter of national import is introduced at the end. The Liberal Democrats embraced meme culture even more explicitly. A video in the run-up to the campaign featured a mash-up of leader Nick Clegg’s speeches overlaid across hit song “Uptown Funk” (@LibDems). This was produced in the style of Cassetteboy, an electronic music duo from London who achieved YouTube success with video pastiches of politicians speeches set satirically to replace the lyrics of popular songs. Here, then, we see a political party borrowing from “produsers” a technique described by Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen and Aram Sinnreich, and derived from online slang for “defeating” an opponent, as “pwning,” “the use of cut-and-paste techniques to make a public figure say or do something different from what he or she originally intended” (539). Also working toward an online aesthetic were the Conservatives in 2019 who produced a YouTube video over an hour long that drew on the online genres of “Vaporwave” and “lo-fi beats” – each of which is native to the web, and widely disseminated on YouTube – and featured a static image of Prime Minster Boris Johnson on a train, with animated landscapes rolling past the train window, and a soundtrack of electronic beats and extracts of his speeches (Conservative Party “lo fi”). This attempt to reach a younger audience (Stokel-Walker) shows parties’ communications teams embracing the digital realm, and the meme-oriented aesthetic described by Brøvig-Hanssen and Sinnrech.

As the minimal impact thesis suggests, voters might be predisposed to view these attempts at cultural relevance through the lens of their existing sentiments about the parties. These videos do, however, illustrate the shifting aesthetic of party-political messaging as a result of users’ greater access to digital technology for mixing and manipulating musical and other media content. Cassetteboy, for instance, had been making music since the 1990s, working initially (as their name suggests) with tapes. They released their first album in 2002 before moving onto the web via MySpace and then YouTube in 2008 (Jones), as the editing technology became more accessible. Political content was a source of inspiration as they moved online – their first video featured a speech by the Prime Minster of the day, Gordon Brown. By 2014, their video of David Cameron (Conservative Prime Minister at the time) amassed over 3.5 million views, clearly demonstrating the saliency of both the platform and their mash-up aesthetic. Since politicians must respond to their media environments – as illustrated above by Wilson’s adoption of the affordances of television, and the professionalization of messaging to reflect the advertising aesthetics of the 1980s – it is perhaps natural that parties sought to capitalize on the popularity of this web-based format.

This isn’t to say that PEBs or popular music in traditional broadcast messaging were completely absent. A central plank of the Green Party’s 2015 campaign was a PEB with a boy-band made up of lookalikes of the other main party leaders singing about agreeing in “party political harmony” (Green Party “Change the Tune”), the message being that there was scant difference between the policies of Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Conservatives and UKIP. A parodic version of a boy band was used here to connote insincerity as part of a broader swipe at the other parties. Nevertheless, although music was not lacking in the central messaging of the 2015 and 2017 campaigns, it had been largely edged out from being a foreground feature of PEBs. Instead, like the PEBs themselves, it sat alongside the plethora of content across broadcast and online media. In 2017, much of the music in key PEBs was notable for its comparative anonymity. These broadcasts, in general, eschewed the use of campaign songs as centerpieces, moving toward “a non-descript musical aesthetic, light on hooks and more reminiscent of mobile phone advertisements than rousing anthems” (Behr and Street). Only the Greens, again, used a pop song in a PEB and this, too, was a relatively anonymous cover version (ibid.) of the Tears for Fears song “Shout” (Green Party PEB 2017). Online videos produced by Momentum – the organization founded in 2015 to support Jeremy Corbyn’s bid for the party leadership – featured background music with electric instruments in a broadly light funk idiom, although Labour’s key Party Election Broadcast had a documentary aesthetic and featured no music. Research by Campaign, a trade magazine for the advertising industry, suggested that the broadcasts overall were failing to substantively engage the public (Brazier).

By 2019, the music of PEBs drew on a wide range of generic templates and instrumental textures but “was largely relegated to underscore that could have easily sat within adverts, film trailers or corporate training videos” (Behr). The overarching effect, then, of the digital component of campaigning on parties has been – as with Vesnic-Alujevic and Van Bauwel’s European examples – an orientation toward content that easily traverses platforms beyond the televisual. This is an important consideration in the battle for voter ears and eyes, particularly regarding the youth vote, as the long-term trend is for viewers to spend less time watching regularly scheduled television. A report by OFCOM, the UK’s broadcast regulator, described a “widening gap” (OFCOM 11) between older and younger viewers, with those aged under 35 years old watching significantly less television (a drop of 14%) between 2014 and 2016 (OFCOM 13) as they migrated to the web. In musical terms, for UK campaigns, this has seen comparatively less focus on music oriented PEBs and a wider range of content – and content that draws explicitly on digital techniques and genres – as parties have followed viewers onto the web.

User Generated Content and Activists’ Involvement

One significant effect of the digitized electoral messaging environment has been felt beyond the parties themselves and concerns the public not only as an electorate but also via their increasing involvement in the production of media content. The intersection of the electoral and popular cultural realms can be tracked against Axel Bruns’s hopeful assertion about the possibility of digital technology for opening out the democratic process. In light of a historical framing of the political sphere as a “spectacle” (Bruns “Towards Produsage” 9) dominated by parties, large media companies and well-resourced interest groups, produsage opens up the potential for new relationships.

If prodused media become a credible and wide-spread alternative to produced media forms, however, then this might ultimately also have an effect on citizens’ understandings of how they relate to their local, national, and global environments – and as regards democracy, it could rekindle a desire on their part to once again become active produsers of democracy, rather than mere passive audiences.

Core elements of produsage are that it is user-led, iterative, collaborative, distinct from corporate (preexisting) models of intellectual property, nonhierarchical, open and community based, and with permeable structures (Bruns “Towards Produsage” 3–4). This is in stark contrast to the model of the Party Election Broadcast, wherein a closed, heavily regulated relationship between national level broadcasters and major political parties prevails. As the previous examples show, this model has come under pressure from the rapidly developing, digitalized media environment. Social media oriented content, drawing on a mash-up aesthetic, demonstrates how parties have responded to broad patterns of produsage but does not, in itself, constitute a new democratic frontier. Despite debates about their policing of intellectual property (Bridy; Negus 373–76) platforms like YouTube are still highly embedded in corporate concerns and benefit from an uneven power dynamic with their end-users. Likewise, political parties adopting new aesthetic strategies in the face of digitalization, including aping the work of produsers, does not necessarily involve a re-orientation of their hierarchical relationship with voters and activists. Nevertheless, recent UK election campaigns have shown that this is not the whole picture, and that the electorate can also deploy digital means. The agency of individual politicians within political parties is also increased along with their capacity to generate musical and media content. Furthermore, since voters and politicians now operate on the same digital platforms, and given the easy manipulability of digital content, the iterative nature of produsage is released. This allows members of the public to adopt, reuse, and reconfigure party messages quickly, and distribute them widely on the same platforms. Finally, the speed with which digital content can be produced and transferred across media allows for permeability across platforms and a level of interaction not possible in the more vertical broadcast environment.

Channels of consumption have become variegated and fragmented, the previous dominance of the state and commercial radio and television stations ceding ground to the web and digital platforms which allow consumers (or produsers) to upload their own material. As outlined above, broadcast has given way in terms of audience share to the web, and this has provided further opportunities for musicians and voters to intervene in the campaign process. The examples below depict how musicians, individual campaigners, and even individual politicians, working beyond the structures of professionally produced and commissioned party content, have been able to deploy digital production tools and consumption platforms to widen the scope of campaigning.

Shifts in musical consumption are echoed, at grassroots as well as higher up the economic ladder, in production. Sanders identifies the “low transactions costs of social media interactions” which are only part of a broader system of technologies and affordances that have impacted political communication at large (104). Nick Prior assesses these changes: “[C]ombined with mobile digital communication protocols such as Wi-Fi, the laptop affords a re-structuring of longstanding everyday practices associated with creativity and interaction across private–public boundaries” (“OK Computer” 920). For Prior, the developments that brought about the onset of domestic digital production and communications technology have “articulated with contemporary social, economic, and political practices to emplace key struts of a reconfigured system of cultural production and consumption” (“New Amateurs” 406). The possibilities for the manipulation of media content, including campaign materials, have been greatly extended and placed in the hands of ordinary consumers – and by extension, voters and campaigners. Music, images, and sounds of political speech have become – like all media content – digital data that can be swiftly and easily re-contextualized throughout a range of sonic and visual media materials, as Brøvig-Hanssen and Sinnrech have demonstrated through their analysis of the remix techniques deployed to critique Donald Trump in the US general election of 2016.

One consequence of this over time in the UK is that the significance and efficacy in the political campaigning process of expensively produced media content by professionals has been diluted. In an age where content can be quickly and easily manipulated by those of an opposing political bent, the value to campaigns of key images and sounds is reduced, and their use riskier. If one aspect of produsage is that it is iterative then this has consequences for those who produce the first version of a message if their intention is for it to remain static in order to convey a political point. For example, a billboard poster depicting a long queue of people at an unemployment office became one of the defining features of the Conservatives’ successful 1979 campaign. By 2010, however, the impact of the wide availability of digital media manipulation tools became obvious when David Cameron released a set of images for his poster campaign, and they were quickly and mockingly Photoshopped. A website was built that allowed visitors to vote on their favorite manipulations of the Tory posters, with a template to help them create their own versions. Even if, as Chris Burgess suggests (186), it is doubtful the extent to which the website itself was much viewed beyond the partisans who produced the material, it swiftly gained national media coverage and encouraged Labour to source ideas from their own supporters, the facility with which such images could be produced and re-produced influencing political campaigning thereafter (Burgess 195). Steadily increasing processing power, the movement of manipulation software to the cloud and the march of sharing platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have accelerated this process, bringing videos and music, like images, within easy reach of supporters of every political party and none – partisans, ideologues, skeptics, and pure pranksters alike. The mash-ups produced by Cassetteboy, for instance, rely on the capacity to digitally cut and paste political speeches. Similarly, in the 2017 election, “Liar Liar” – a song by the band Captain Ska – incorporated Conservative leader Theresa May’s speeches laid over an instrumental ska track and interspersed with a female vocal admonishing her for being a liar while mockingly quoting her campaign slogan “strong and stable” and referencing issues like nurses' pay and underfunded schools.

This was an example of how musical, video, and political content mixed with ease, and of how politicians’ messaging could be reused to attack them. Although comprised of professional musicians, Captain Ska is described on its website as a band having “come together to mix activism and music.” A grassroots campaign during the election drove the single into the charts in a challenge to both the incumbent party of government and established forums of political communication as the song’s presence in the charts created problems for broadcasters bound by rules of impartiality during an election period (Coffey).

“Liar Liar” was a critique of the Prime Minister, but supportive interactions between the musical and political realms have also been a feature of this landscape. The Labour Party, for example, has had its campaigns bolstered by popular musical interventions that emerged outside of the PEBs and alongside, though distinct from, the party message grids. The Grime4Corbyn movement in 2017, for instance, was an alliance of supporters of the Labour leader and artists operating in the “Grime” genre that relied on social media platforms for its significant grassroots appeal. It aligne with Labour’s courting of the youth vote and here, also, the proliferation of digital platforms and publications had a bearing, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s “receptiveness to non-traditional media” (Gent and Walker 120) resonating with the youth demographic. Corbyn’s appearances in youth-focused online publications and platforms served an “organic synergy between a broad coalition of digital activists” (McDowell-Naylor 198) centered on the “#grimeforcorbyn” hashtag.

The relationship between musical activity and the political grassroots was even more obvious in the refrain of “Oh Jeremy Corbyn,” sung to the melody of the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army.” This emerged from the use of gigs as political platforms. Corbyn’s appearance before a performance by the Libertines at the Tranmere football ground in Merseyside during the 2017 campaign resulted in the crowd adapting his name into a kind of political football chant, singing it repeatedly to the tune of the White Stripes song. This was widely adopted throughout the campaign, and – with Corbyn himself – also featured at the Glastonbury festival.

Several interventions from musical celebrities, and even politicians themselves, were flavored by the aesthetic of “user generated content.” Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour’s endorsement of Labour, for instance, took the form of a tweet (@DavidGilmour) with a home video of him singing new lyrics to Billy Bragg’s “Between the Wars” which referenced policies like the “living wage” (an increased minimum wage), praised the welfare state by citing the “cradle to grave” coverage of the National Health Service and concluded with the guitarist himself urging viewers to vote for “the many not the few” – a Labour campaign slogan. Gilmour is an adept, and wealthy, music professional with the resources to produce much slicker content. His homespun release, as well as conveying a sense of personal investment in the message, also evidenced the capacity for voters of all kinds to contribute in this way and appeared intended to depict a degree of authenticity. In other words, it became an act of produsage rather than a hierarchically oriented piece of content arranged between a rock star and the party.

The campaign also took place in a news media environment whereby crowd sourced content made its way onto newspaper websites or broadcast items. This included politicians’ uses of both impromptu and staged musical moments to authenticate themselves, such as when Corbyn sang along with a busker (Dobson), and the Scottish National Party’s Mhairi Black sang “Caledonia” in a pub, an emotional paean to the nation that resonated with her nationalist politics (Clarke). Mobile phone footage of these encounters with the public found their way onto the websites of news organizations (Behr and Street) demonstrating, again, the growing speed with which musical content could be deployed via digital technology, without the need for party infrastructure.

The affordances of production technology and the internet made their way into local campaigns in 2017 too. Conservative candidate Greg Knight co-wrote a jingle for the lo-fi video for his campaign which was the source of much online amusement due to its low production values – stilted delivery from Knight, filmed in low resolution in his office – and somewhat tacky aesthetic, with a jingle that deployed dated synth sounds and obvious rhymes (“get it right, vote for Greg Knight”). Typically, both supporters and opponents remixed and added visuals to his musical outputs on YouTube (Belam). Knight’s efforts may have been widely mocked but they were, at least, specific to the campaign in his seat (which he held), rather than only aligned with the party’s efforts on national media. They also, arguably, garnered more attention in national media for the local campaign in East Yorkshire than would otherwise have been the case.

The point here is not that popular music was lacking from latter-day general election campaigns. There was as much of it as ever, if not more. Its role, and placement, had changed however. The music of the PEBs that played out across the major broadcasters had drifted from being a central component of those broadcasts, and signifying a core campaign song, toward serving as a smoothed-out underscore of mood music. Pop riffs, alongside celebrity endorsements, were played out across social media, finding their way into the mainstream via mobile phones, tweets and videos that were picked up by broadcasters and the press. As “the line between the so-called ‘air war’ of mediated communication and the ‘ground war’ of face-to-face contact is … increasingly blurred” by social media (Anstead 23), the use of music has become less a matter solely of celebrity endorsements or campaign songs, and more a mélange of user generated content and party productions. Aspects of modern popular musical aesthetics and relationships, then, have found their way into the political sphere – the feedback loop between audience and musicians at live events (as with the Corbyn chant), the proliferation of platforms for viral content, and the capacity to sample, reconfigure and redeploy musical materials to provide that content.

The uses of music in election campaigns, then, are multifarious, with the messages of party machines, activists and members of the public (those who are and who aren’t politically aligned) becoming increasingly interconnected. If the days of heavily branded celebrity endorsements and iconic mainstream media party productions as the most obvious modes of popular music in political communication are numbered, this is in some ways less of a stark break with the past than it might at first appear. Politics has long been mediatized and, as John Street notes in his typology of celebrity politicians, “Political representation is an art that draws on the skills and resources which define mass-mediated popular culture” (“Celebrity Politicians” 446).

Conclusions

In a media landscape infused by produsage, and where production tools and the spread of digitalization across media forms has allowed activists to work easily with music and video as well as text and images, music’s role in political communication has been altered. The use of music in campaign materials is no longer the primary province of professionals, party operatives and broadcasters. It is difficult to conclude decisively whether this constitutes, overall, an increase (or indeed decrease) in democratization. The same tools are, of course, available to professionals and parties alike and, as shown above, they have adapted their techniques and aesthetics to address the prevalence of the “user-generated” content. The ultimate impact of these changes on voting patterns is also open to debate. The national coordinator of the Labour supporting activist group Momentum, for instance, claimed 70 million views for their videos in the 2019 election (@BBCPolitics), which stood in stark contrast to their overwhelming defeat at the hands of the voters.

Of more significance is the way in which digitalization has changed the characteristics of musical content, and its positioning within the campaign processes at large. Decentralization and democratization are not intrinsically congruent but the digital space, by putting musical campaign processes in the hands of the public (or at least those politically minded produsers among it) has changed the dynamic between the participants. As the musical (and media) space has expanded from PEBs and professionally produced medial content to incorporate a plethora of remixed, reconfigured, and original materials, musicians, members of the public and individual politicians have come to stand on a more level plane with the party machines. If, as Brøvig-Hanssen and Sinnreich suggest of remix videos, the combination of entertainment and multifarious techniques introduce an aspect of “instability and ambiguity [that may] spark tactical ‘readings,’ engagement, and debate among their audience” (547), it seems plausible that the more open soundscape of elections has a comparable effect, even if it is not yet possible to map that onto distinct electoral outcomes. In other words, the relationship within the nexus of actors in musical political communication has shifted. Party machines still have a role, even a dominant one. But they have had to respond aesthetically to the “new amateurs” and, in terms of their orientation toward online platforms, to the viewing and listening habits of produsers and their peers. The relative decline of the PEB and, at same time, the rapid transfer of content across digital platforms have pulled musical content, political opinion and the speeches of politicians themselves (as with, for instance, CassetteBoy and “Liar Liar”) into the same, fluid aesthetic space in which individual activists, politicians, and musicians enjoy the same level of agency – if not, perhaps, the same size of audience – as party machines. News stories now emerge from the spontaneous chants of a crowd at a gig (as with the White Stripes derived Corbyn song), or the “home made” feel of an MP’s personal jingle (as with Greg Knight). Parties themselves draw on the cut-and-paste aesthetic of artists like Cassetteboy and online genres like Vaporwave, alongside their more formal PEBs. Music is threaded throughout a much more variegated type of political communication in the digital realm.

While this article has sought to trace the background to these developments and illustrate some of the ways that they have played out in practice across electoral politics, their longer-term ramifications require further investigation. On the one hand, as Bruns notes, “such remixing activities may be seen as fulfilling an important cultural and political role … compatible with the political role also played by citizen journalism as the mashup of news media content similarly serves to expose and correct what participants perceive as shortcomings and bias in the commercial media” (Blogs 238). This is a comparatively optimistic prognosis, wherein a greater number of citizens “participating in processes of political produsage” (Blogs 383) can have a beneficial and cohesive effect on society. On the other hand, digitalization has the capacity to create silos and for activists’ musical outputs to speak largely to the converted. Such deliberative, discursive “produsage” also takes place in the same sphere as the rapidly evolving responses of state and party machines with their own resources. The nexus is re-oriented, but the extent to which the power dynamic is disrupted in the long-term is debatable. As Nick Prior notes with regard to the digital developments in the music industries that have created a space for new participants, we can take a long view of the process as “a cat-and-mouse story of conservation, innovation, and subversion, a reconfiguration rather than a revolution” (“New Amateurs” 406).

What the uses of music presented here demonstrate is the increasing fluidity of political communication and the potential of user-generated, digital culture to change the terms of engagement to one where professional political operatives must respond, rather than just broadcast (in both the literal and more metaphorical senses). The extent to which this constitutes a democratization of the political process is an open question. Increased capacity for individuals to participate across the digitized media landscape, the growth in grassroots derived content, and the dilution of the top down model of PEBs, is one facet of digitalization. Adaptation, adoption, and convergence of messaging by traditionally powerful operatives on platforms that are still, ultimately, imbricated in corporate concerns is another. The changed musical aesthetic of election campaigns has shown the capacity of user-generated content to operate iteratively and to allow for some permeability across the channels of political communication. The extent to which these entrants into the campaigning ecosystem have genuinely broken down hierarchies in the longer term, or actively disrupted corporate structures, and their inroads into political culture, is less clear. Assessing the aesthetic components of campaign materials, and the role of citizen produsers in the process, is a starting point. A useful next step for researchers in understanding the effects of digitalization on democracy in practice will be to unpack the more opaque professional operations of parties’ responses, and their musical choices and practices, in the digital sphere. The relationship between musical content and democratic outcomes is complex and deeply entangled in the broader nexus of messages and actors – the framework of factors in media effects overall. But further consideration of where and how music is deployed in the political process is more than just a question of its aesthetic qualities and could serve an assessment of the power dynamics that underpin the digital flow of content.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to sincerely thank the anonymous reviewers and issue editors for the detailed and insightful comments and suggestions they provided, which have significantly informed this article

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adam Behr

Adam Behr is a senior lecturer in Contemporary and Popular Music at the International Centre for Music Studies, Newcastle University. He is a director of the knowledge exchange body Live Music Exchange. His interests include the intersection of music and politics, popular music history, the music industries, and cultural policy. His research has included projects examining the cultural value of live music, live music censuses and mapping in the UK, digitization, copyright and musical practice and the relationships between venues, musicians and policy-makers. As well as academic journal articles and chapters, he has written extensively for the web, including for Live Music Exchange and The Conversation.

Notes

1. Miliband was Labour leader in the 2015 General Election and a key component of Conservative electoral strategy was the message that, in the event of a hung parliament, he would be beholden to the Scottish National Party, who looked set to make big gains in Scotland.